Atlas OnePoint: Spammers

Some random bits scribbled by Jeremy Zawodny

You know, going to
the SES Conference, I tried to give these on-line marketing folks
the benefit of the doubt. Maybe they're not all the sort of scum
who'd love nothing more than another chance to shove their "message"
down my throat, spam me, or re-sell my e-mail address.

Case in point: Atlas OnePoint.

I just received an unsolicited e-mail message from them which
begins:

Thank you for visiting our booth at Search Engine Strategies, San
Jose. We appreciate your interest in our innovative suite of online
marketing tools. You may have seen our recent announcement - GO TOAST
is now Atlas OnePoint (www.AtlasOnePoint.com)

Hang on a sec. I didn't visit any booths at SES. I
arrived about 10 minutes before my session time, sat on the panel, and
then left shortly after. Besides, when our panel ended, the
conference was over. So I'm pretty sure I didn't swing by on
my way out the door.

Dave Carlson, President of Atlas OnePoint (phone number
1-800-416-8389), screw you and your company.

I hope that someone searching for your company stumbled across this
post and decides to take their business elsewhere.

Merely confirms my suspicion. You've added me to your "news" list
under false pretenses and now expect me to do the work of fixing your
mistake. How about if I repay the favor by running up the bill on
that 1-800 number? Or convincing as many of my crazy blogger friends
as possible to link to my story. Wouldn't it be fun to have this on
the first page of search results as your own company web site?

In case the larger message is not clear, spamming people is not the
way to win their business. It has the opposite effect. My e-mail box
is not for your "news", marketing, press releases, and related
junk.

Jeremy -- any idea how they got your address in the first place? seems odd; I doubt the conference organisers would have given the assembled booth vendors the email addys of all the speakers... (but I could be wrong.)

Convention spam can be some of the worst. It's no so bad for the free conventions but for the ones where you pay high registration fees just to get into the convention so you can walk the floor and be pitched and then you get slammed with spam without asking for it ... that's not cool.

Speaking of spam, I sure get a LOT of it in my Yahoo email account. WTF?

You know, if I attend a conference, I really don't mind getting emails from companies that were there. I might be somewhat interested. Hell, even if you MAIL me stuff I won't go ballistic and be a complete ass by telling you "fuck you". Hell, Yahoo's spam is much more annoying - stuff for which I'm not even remotely interested in, and never ever expressed any interest in in the first place.

I got the same email, and I didn't visit the booth. I also had a reader yesterday ask me the same thing, how they got on the list when they didn't attend the show. I've asked Jupitermedia to look into this. My understanding was that attendee names were not given to third parties. It's not been an issue that I've ever seen come up like this before. So if something's changed, I'll work on my end to change it back.

Alright, I have received more detail from a sponsor (the name of which I will not reveal). It was a mess up, they sent out a list of some sort and instead of deleting data, they hid the data. I wrote about this at my blog posting named Atlas OnePoint Messes with Jeremy Zawodny.

Mistakes happen, I am forgiving. But that is me, most people are not as forgiving (I don't judge). :)

Sounds like a bunch of pedantic whining. You post your e-mail address on the WWW - expect unsolicited e-mail.

Atlas OnePoint has some interesting technology which you're discounting based on a clerical error (not even on their part). I suppose it's a big achievement that your groupies skewed Google's seach results.

Posting their 800 number is classic passive/aggressive behavior.

Like the world's gonna come to an end because of your e-mail address inadvertantly being added to their distribution list.

The show's policy is NOT to give attendee contact details to sponsors and exhibitors. We do share job titles and company names. That's so sponsors and exhibitors have some idea of the types of people who attended the show. But actual names of individuals or email addresses? No, we don't give those out as a matter of policy.

Unfortunately, in providing the usual job title/company name information after our latest show, we inadvertently included email addresses. The information had been hidden within a spreadsheet that was sent, rather than actually being deleted before sending.

We've now emailed all sponsors and exhibtors that they should not use the information to contact attendees, assuming they found it in the first place. From our end, we apologize for what happened. We'll ensure such a thing doesn't happen again.

We at Atlas OnePoint screwed-up. It's that simple. I'm the president of Atlas OnePoint and the buck stops on my desk.

I have been in communication with Danny Sullivan and Jupitermedia about our error. We have destroyed the email list Jupitermedia sent to us.

There are a number of unfortunate circumstances that led to our mistake in sending out the emails to the Search Engine Strategies attendees. That doesn't help get the unwanted email out of people's inboxes. For that I must apologize.

Atlas OnePoint despises SPAM as much as Jeremy Zawondy. Jeremy has every right to be upset! Atlas OnePoint has clear internal policies for how we handle email lists and email communications sent to our customer base. We did not follow those policies.

We sent the WRONG email message to the WRONG email list WITHOUT the standard Atlas OnePoint email unsubscribe language.

I get calls every day from SEO companies. I never get my badge scanned at SES but always had the suspicion that they got my name from the registration list. I am sure a lot of them just search Yahoo and see who is paying high $ for PPC.

I love it when they call and tells me, "I see you are $xx per click for "competitive keyword"". I love the fact that I just paid for their click so they could call me and waste my time.

If you are that good, why are you calling me? Shouldn't I be calling you?

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